TIME October 23, 2017
aged white cop—have developed an unlikely friend-
ship. Together, they built a coalition of community
leaders, law enforcement, social workers and con-
cerned citizens to create a violence-prevention task
force called South Stockton Promise Zone. In the five
years since they started, homicides and gun crimes
fell significantly before recently stabilizing.
When Tubbs was first elected, he didn’t know that
building the South Stockton Promise Zone would
entail negotiating a truce. “Being so young, I didn’t
realize many of these organizations were at war with
each other,” he said. He got them to work together by
cracking jokes and pooling resources.
Pragmatism is a trait that
runs across the generation,
says Morley Winograd, co-
author ofMillennial Momen-
tum: How a New Generation Is
Remaking America. “Millenni-
als approach a task by forming
a team to take it on,” he says,
describing a method that suits
government work. “The differ-
ence between boomers and
millennials is that one wants
to do it in a win-lose way, the
other wants to do it in a win-
win way.”
Elections, of course, are
win-lose affairs, yet elected
millennials appear uncom-
monly comfortable question-
ing their parties. Buttigieg
expressed doubts about Dem-
ocratic strategies for reviv-
ing the Rust Belt economy, and
Myrick, who campaigned as a surrogate for Hillary
Clinton, said he’s not surprised her message didn’t
resonate. Stewart, the Republican mayor of New
Britain, Conn., keeps a picture of Obama in her of-
fice. Like almost all the mayors interviewed, she says
she feels “inspired” by the former President. She also
says Trump has made the office into a “joke.”
“I get along better with younger Republicans
than some older Democrats,” says Daniel Riemer,
30, a Democratic state representative in Wisconsin.
U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik, 33, a Republican
from upstate New York, worked with young
Democratic colleagues to push for legislation to make
college more affordable and advocate for stronger
action on climate change. “Older elected officials have
aged during so much gridlock and partisan fighting,”
she says. “I just think my generation doesn’t want
to see the extreme partisanship that we’re seeing.”
That said, Trump’s election may have inspired
even more young Americans to enter the arena. A
2013 survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center andUSA
Today found that only 13% of them had seriouslyNEXT GENERATION MAYORS ▼
homemade dinners on Instagram. In Ithaca, Myrick
has turned to social media to crowdfund city projects
like the July 4th fireworks display. Buttigieg had to
introduce new software to improve coordination
between South Bend’s city agencies, he says, because
“I was getting all my crime stats by fax.” And Morse
describes switching Holyoke city emails to Gmail and
computers to Macs as “little things that, as a young
person, seem normal to me.”
To other young people, these changes make local
government seem less musty. They don’t have to show
up to municipal meetings to get in touch with their
representatives. “We see ourselves in him,” says Har-
old Grigsby, 20, an intern in
Tubbs’ office who never con-
sidered politics until meeting
him. “If he can do it, I can do it.
He’ll tweet right back at you.”
But there can be downsides
to the intimacy of social
media, particularly when it
meets the porous boundaries
of public life. Before she
settled down with her fiancé,
Stewart took a stab at Tinder.
“Surprisingly, there are quite
a few other elected officials
on Tinder as well,” she says.
“I definitely swiped left.”
Others are explicit about
avoiding the unfiltered risks
of social media. Myrick speaks
to the hazards, though not in
terms typically heard on C-
SPAN. “We realized that there
were lingering consequences to
something you wrote on AIM or MySpace or Face-
book,” he says. “I didn’t think there was ever a mo-
ment in my life when I felt the kind of anonymity
that some people do when they’re in a club with
their shirt off, like doing lines of cocaine off their
best friend’s butt.”
STOCKTON POLICE CHIEFEric Jones is updating
Tubbs on the latest crime stats when a server deliv-
ers a bowl of unfamiliar beans to their table. “What
do I do with this?” asks the chief, who has been serv-
ing in the Stockton police department for almost
as long as Tubbs has been breathing. You use your
teeth, Tubbs explains, and then demonstrates how
to eat edamame.
In 2012, when Tubbs was a senior at Stanford and
first planning his successful run for city council, 71
people were killed in Stockton, a higher per capita
murder rate than in Chicago or Afghanistan. That
year, Stockton also became the largest municipality
in America to declare bankruptcy. In the years since,
Tubbs and Jones—a young black man and a middle-
▲
SOUTH BEND,
IND.PETE
BUTTIGIEG
The 35-year-old,
pictured here on
Late Night with Seth
Meyers, says his view
of national security
was shaped by serving
in AfghanistanBUTTIGIEG: LLOYD BISHOP—NBC/NBCU/GETTY IMAGES; STEWART: STAN GODLEWSKI—HARTFORD COURANT/AP